Alex
Yates (2007, Temple University). Alex's dissertation,
Information Extraction from the Web: Techniques and Applications,
investigated the problem of unsupervised synonym resolution on the
Web.
Ana-Maria
Popescu (2007, Yahoo Research). Ana-Maria's
dissertation, Information Extraction from Unstructured Web Text ,
investigated how to extract high-quality information from Web
text. Her most impressive demonstration was the Opine system,
which extracted product attributes, and associated opinions, from
reviews found on-line.
Dr.
Luke
McDowell (2004, U.S. Naval Academy). Luke's
dissertation,
Bringing Meaning to the Masses, investigated how to make the Semantic
Web a reality and how to generalize the vision to encompass email as
well. Co-advisor: Alon Halevy.
Dr. Mike
Perkowitz. (2000, Amazon.com, Intel Research, Startups) Mike's
dissertation, Adaptive Web
Sites, investigated web sites that automatically reconfigure their
layout and presentation by analyzing user access patterns recorded in
their server logs.
Dr. Oren Zamir (1999, Google). Oren's dissertation, Clustering
Web Documents: A Phrase-Based Method for Grouping Search Engine
Results, investigated the use of a novel and fast clustering algorithm
to group the results of Web search engines into easily-browsed
clusters. The most distinctive aspect of the algorithm was its
treatment of documents as strings of words, represented by a suffix
tree, in contrast with the standard vector-based representation.
Dr. Erik
Selberg (1999, Microsoft). Erik's dissertation, Towards
Comprehensive Web Search, explored meta-search as embodied in
MetaCrawler. The dissertation was the first to show (back in WWW4,
1995) that the fraction of the Web covered by individual search engines
such as Alta Vista and Lycos was very limited, demonstrating the need
for meta-search engines.
Dr. Keith Golden
(1997, NASA Ames, Google). Keith's dissertation, Planning Support for
Softbots,
investigated novel planning and knowledge representation techniques to
support softbots. Primary advisor: Dan Weld.
Dr. Neal Lesh
(1997, MERL, Harvard MPH). Neal's dissertation, Scalable and Adaptive
Goal
Recognition, focused on automating the construction of plan libraries
adapting techniques from planning and concept learning. His objective
was to scale up goal recognition to domains containing millions of
plans and goals.
Dr.
Richard Segal (1996, IBM Watson research center). Richard's
dissertation, Machine Learning as Massive Search, focused on data
mining using massive search: our BRUTE data mining software can analyze
over 100,000 hypotheses per second, when run on a SPARC-10.
Masters Students Advised
Tessa Lau.
Master's thesis: Privacy in a Collaborative Web Browsing Environment,
1997. (UW PhD with Weld and Domingos, now at IBM).
Marc
Langheinrich. Master's thesis: A domain independent architecture
for efficient information retrieval on the World Wide Web, 1997 (NEC
Research, Tokyo).
Jonathan Shakes. Master's thesis: Dynamic Reference Sifting: a
Case Study in the Homepage Domain, 1996. (Amazon.com).
Terrance Goan. Master's thesis: Learning About Software Errors,
1994. (Shai.com).
